Jennifer Howard

I hit an unexpected and unwelcome writing hiatus this past month when my netbook stopped working. I want to say that the netbook died or that it decided to quit on me, but that would be giving it a life and a sense of being that it doesn’t deserve, much as I loved it. (And I did love it.) And even saying that a machine doesn’t deserve something anthropomorphizes it. It’s hard to resist the pull to see one’s writing implements as collaborators. Writing gets very tangled up for me with the mechanics by which it’s accomplished. There’s a practical… Read more...

A quick recap of what I’ve been doing since August instead of blogging: I vacationed (or staycationed). I started Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” which somebody should have made me read sooner. I wrote about some neat work being done by two biologists and a physicist who are using algorithms and massive amounts of citation data to create what they call a Google Maps of scholarship. I tried to sort out some nagging thoughts about what happens to individual authors and their work in a publishing/information ecosystem that’s geared more and more toward accumulating massive amounts of “content” and then… Read more...